Asia
ScoresThe
region's movies come of age at the Cannes festival, with four big awards-and,
in Ang Lee's martial-arts fantasy, one peerless triumph
By RICHARD CORLISS

Just for fun, they should call it the Scandal Film Festival. Each May,
Cannes brews enough brouhaha to keep 40,000 movie professionals coming
back for more. Last year the festival jury gave the Best Actress prize
to two novices and the back of its palm to half a dozen top directors
who had submitted strong films.

This time the big laurels ­ Best Picture and Best Actress ­ went to an
English-language musical, Dancer in the Dark, written and directed by
Lars Von Trier, the melancholy Dane, and starring Icelandic pop star Björk.
Half the audience thought it was the best-ever song-and-dance movie about
a half-blind factory worker who wants to be Julie Andrews in The Sound
of Music. The other (sensible) half didn't. Much glowering ensued between
the combatant sides. But that's one of the darling things about Cannes:
film lovers are ready to declare war over movies most people will never
care about, or even hear about.

At the 53rd International Film Festival, there were also a few ­ we won't
call them scandals ­ controversies about the Asian films. This was the
year Asia was finally to be fully recognized at Cannes, with seven of
the 23 films in competition for the Palme d'Or coming from China, Taiwan,
Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and Iran. The continent's moviemakers did not
disappoint: they took a disproportionate share of the prizes handed out
by French director Luc Besson and his jury. Jiang Wen's Devils on the
Doorstep (China) won the runner-up Grand Prix. Samira Makhmalbaf's Blackboards
(Iran) shared the third-place Jury Prize; at 20, she is the youngest director
ever to win a prize at Cannes. Edward Yang was named Best Director for
A One and a Two (Taiwan); and Tony Leung Chiu-wai received the Best Actor
citation for In the Mood for Love (Hong Kong). Eureka, from Japan, earned
the top film critics' award.

A handsome
showing, to be sure. Yet the film that, by common consent, scored the
one unmistakable triumph at Cannes was not eligible for any jury award.
Gilles Jacob, the festival's program director, did not select Ang Lee's
made-in-China martial arts epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as one
of the 23 films in competition. A resonant fantasy of young love fulfilled
and mature love deferred, with some astonishingly buoyant combat scenes,
the movie was perhaps a little too enjoyable for Jacob to consider it
art. Lee defended the film with his usual diplomacy: "I think the movie
has a lot of artistic value, but it's also entertaining. "Then he smiled.
"Maybe it's not in competition because it kicked ass."

Jiang Wen, mainland China's top actor and most vigorous director, is an
ass-kicker from way back. Solid, defiantly outspoken, an enemy of tact,
he doesn't court controversy; it buzzes around him like flies at a honey
pot. So he is as unlikely to accede to political demands for changes in
his bold black comedy as he is to cut a second of its 2 hr. 42 min. running
time. No matter that the political wariness came from both the Chinese
censor board and some potential Japanese investors; no matter that Jiang's
own mother told him the movie was too long. "I'm not making the film for
anybody but myself,"he says. "That's not arrogance speaking. Only a director
in love with his own work can make a film others will like."

Devils on the Doorstep is set at the end of World War II in a Chinese
village occupied by the Japanese army. One night, a villager (the director
plays the lead role) hears a knock on his door. Who's there? "Me!" The
Me, who never identifies himself, orders the villager to take care of
two bags for a few days. Inside the bags are a Japanese officer and his
Chinese translator. The village council interrogates the officer: Have
you killed Chinese men? Raped Chinese women? "Yes! "the officer expectorates.
"That's what I came to China for!" But the translator, afraid that he
will be killed along with his fellow captive, softens every oath into
a compliment. The vilest curse becomes "Happy New Year, brother-in-law!"
Then why does the officer shout with such fury?" Japanese always sound
the same," the translator explains, "whether they're happy or angry."

Perhaps the antagonists wouldn't understand each other even if the translations
were accurate, so different are their cultures. The villagers see their
occupiers as barbarians; the Japanese see the Chinese as craven. "That's
the Chinese way of thinking," a Japanese says. "Miserable life is better
than honorable death." In this brutal demonstration of man's stupidity
to man, all life is miserable; no death is honorable. The defenseless
(an old man, a woman, a boy)will be killed for instruction or sport. And
the film will explode from black-and-white into carnal color only when
the last ordinary man has paid for the crime of being in the wrong place
(earth)at the wrong time.

It is not a stretch to see the film ­ which is too long but also quite
powerful, a document written in human blood ­ as Jiang's own battle for
survival in the cultural crossfire. Japanese producers were afraid the
film would upset the country's right wing. "So they presented suggestions
to me, "he says. "At the same time, I got a letter from the Chinese Film
Bureau. Eighty percent of their objections were the same as the suggestions
from the Japanese producers. Don't let Japanese soldiers kill people;
Chinese people shouldn't be so dumb; Japanese soldiers shouldn't be kept
as prisoners. If I followed these suggestions, I couldn't make the movie!''

The director concedes that he grew up with his own ethnic stereotypes:
"As a child I'd see foreign films and think all their eyes were so deep
­ I just found them horrible-looking." But now he has to fight the stereotyping
imposed by censors. "The biggest problem today for filmmakers in China
is that there are no strict, apparent guidelines. One can only guess.
This game is a black comedy in and of itself. It's like the peasants in
my movie: only imagining things, not being able to know for sure. Ishould
call my next movie Guess."

Tony Leung (left) and Maggy Cheung (right) in a scene from Wong Kar-wai's
'In the Mood for Love'.

Jiang's films
are shouts; Yang's are whispers. In A One and a Two he portrays a Taiwanese
family tiptoeing individually and together to the precipice of crisis. NJ(Wu
Nienjen) is a businessman whose company needs a new-media fix from a Japanese
swami (the marvelous Issey Ogata). NJ's wife Nin-nin (Elaine Jin) seeks
emotional solace in a Buddhist retreat. The other members of the family
have their own picturesque problems, which Yang paints in a style closer
to that of Japanese masters of the contemplative like Yasujiro Ozu than
to that of the burlier Hong Kong and mainland films. At 2 hr. 52 min., A
One and a Two contains a few too many scenes of silent staring into the
middle distance, but they have a cumulative impact. Yang is like the family's
young son who takes pictures of the backs of people's heads. "You couldn't
see it,"he says, "so I showed you." Yang takes pictures of the pain in people's
souls.

Unlike his fellow countryman Ang Lee, Yang has stayed home, making films
in the small, stricken Taiwanese art-house mode. "He's in the very advanced
American system,"Yang says. "I work in a handicraft industry. I feel fortunate
to make films in Taiwan, because I get the challenge of doing everything
myself. In Hollywood, I'd just be given the script and do the directing."

Most of the other Asian films are handicrafts, including Im Kwon-teak's
pageant-like Chunhyang, a colorful retelling of a Korean fable in the
ponsori song style. But whatever size the film, it gets the big Cannes
treatment, like mandatory tuxedos for the main performance. Says Im, "There's
a convoy of official cars, a lot of photo calls-and the whole red-carpet
ceremony. Psychologically, it's a very pressure-filled custom. But once
I walked onto the red carpet, I was happy I wore the tuxedo. It seemed
a sign of showing respect for the work we did."

Japan got no respect from the jury, though it brought Taboo, the first
film in 15 years by perpetual renegade Nagisa Oshima (In the Realm of
the Senses), and Shinji Aoyama's Eureka, which many thought was the finest
film in competition. Three people-a man (Koji Yakusho, star of Shall We
Dance?) and two children-survive a serial killer's attack on a bus. The
experience leaves the children mute. To help them, the man takes them
on a long trip. How long? Eureka runs, or ambles, 3 hr. 37 min.; we're
in Gone With the Wind territory here. But Aoyama has a facility with images
and a gift for minimalist drama that makes this a searing journey. One
could see the film and shout, "Eureka!"

There are no murders, but many little deaths of the spirit, in Wong Kar-wai's
In the Mood for Love, a gorgeous showcase for the pensive glamour of Hong
Kong's Maggie Cheung. She's a married woman who befriends a neighbor (Tony
Leung). Soon they realize that their spouses are having an affair with
each other. Should they follow suit? They start spending time together,
trying to hide their forlorn, at first innocent friendship from nosy neighbors.
Set mostly in 1962, the film depicts an old-fashioned, middle-class romance-all
that delicious guilt without any messy ecstasy- spiced with the tension
of furtiveness. This bereaved couple's only sin is that they are keeping
their not-quite affair a secret. Do they ever consummate their love? The
director says yes; you'll decide for yourself.

The film could be called For the Love of Mood, so attentive is it to the
details of setting and costume, of feelings unspoken and, perhaps, love
unfulfilled. The director of Chungking Express and Happy Together has
put aside his celebrated cinematic and emotional pyrotechnics to portray
a world of propriety and repression. Here, the important things are those
withheld: information from the audience (we never see the faces of the
cheating spouses), passionate release from the characters. Yet there is
all the drama anyone could ask for in

Leung's sad, sensitive eyes, and in the solitude of chic misery as Cheung
walks in slow motion toward her empty room.

There's motion aplenty, very little of it slow, in the high-flying Crouching
Tiger. Also emotion, in the generational struggle between a pair of warriors
(veteran enchanters Michelle Yeoh and Chow Yun-fat) and a girl-woman (Zhang
Ziyi) with suspiciously superior kung fu skills. The first battle, with
Yeoh chasing Zhang up walls and over roofs, spurred spontaneous applause
at the critics' screening and the evening's performance-the movie is that
kind of pleasure-giving experience. There are fights on the tops of bamboo
trees (a tribute to King Hu's seminal film A Touch of Zen), a rapturous
tryst for Zhang in the Gobi Desert (with hunky Chang Chen as a sort of
Lawrence of East Asia) and a death scene to die for. And all in two hours
flat.

Based on a series of novels published in the 1920s, this martial-arts
marvel embraced all the best traits of Cannes. It had red-carpet glamour
in its cast-we're convinced Michelle Yeoh is the world's most beautiful
movie star-and a star-is-made performance by Zhang. Like A One and a Two
it shows bright young people rebelling against their elders. It describes
two poignant romances:one (as in Chunhyang) of young lovers battling a
hostile world to be together; the other (like In the Mood for Love) of
a mature couple in mourning for a love they acknowledged too late.

But it is daft to compare Lee's soaring spectacle with other pictures;
this one was in a class by itself. Crouching Tiger was not only the best
film at Cannes, it was the only real movie.